Blizzard announces that the upcoming version 1.07 patch for Diablo III is now live on the Public Test Realm for the action/RPG sequel. The post has full details on how interested players can log into the PTR and participate. This is accompanied by this post, which offers change notes for the patch, which are not considered final until the patch goes live on the main servers. The notes discuss how dueling will work, how Nephalem Valor will no longer expire between acts, a doubling in base pickup radius, the removal of the resurrection timer, the removal of player "flinching" hesitations, an increase in Monster Power XP and plan drop rates, and players will now always begin in town on restarting a game. There are also details on UI and quality of life changes, bug fixes, Wizard and Monk buffs, the new crafting system, and much more.

Asmo wrote on Jan 16, 2013, 17:54:I tried hard, really, I almost made it to lvl 10 in the demo before laughing it off as a bad joke.

I figure the Diablo series was never for you in the first place then. In Diablo 2, by lvl 10...what have you accomplished? Compared to D3?

Its not about what you acomplish, its about the story, dialogue, atmosphere etc. By level 10 you can already pretty much figure out that its not the moody dark game that it should have been

Really? I would challenge that. Old Tristram is gone, hundreds of New Tristram townsmen are dead. There are corpses absol-f*ckin-lootley everywhere. The act 1 music is the darkest in Diablo history, just not melodic, and Matt Uelman melodic was what we all wanted but didn't get. None the less, it was effective atmospherically. There is nothing but death for the entire first act. Unlike D2, your char actually has a reason for being at the initial starting point of the game/story and has an understanding of what has happened over the last 20 years, unlike the D2 char that just showed up conveniently days after the warrior beat Diablo. D2 chars didn't have a clue storywise why they were there except a rumour about treasure in the cathedral and maybe a demon or two to kill. Atmosphere? Diablo 3 destroys Diablo 2 during the first 10-15 levels (and don't misunderstand me here, ONLY during the first 10-15 levels). I dunno about you, but revisiting the original Tristram and going through the cathedral FAR outweighs wandering around the Stone Fields looking for a the cave to the Dark Woods so you can revisit an incomplete bastardized version of Tristram where cow guts blow up in your face.

Act 1 D3 > Act 1 D2 in about every single way, except that there is no chance that you can equip the entire Sigon's set so you can bypass 2 difficulties worth of the game quickly.

The only point I want to make is that anyone saying Diablo 3 sucks, hindsight aside, compared to Diablo 2 based on only the first 10 LEVELS is a troll. The only thing admirable about Diablo 3 was that the first act was one of the best parts of the entire franchise in its history. The rest of the game....yeah no.

Asmo wrote on Jan 16, 2013, 17:54:I tried hard, really, I almost made it to lvl 10 in the demo before laughing it off as a bad joke.

I figure the Diablo series was never for you in the first place then. In Diablo 2, by lvl 10...what have you accomplished? Compared to D3?

Its not about what you acomplish, its about the story, dialogue, atmosphere etc. By level 10 you can already pretty much figure out that its not the moody dark game that it should have been. Everybody and their grandma talks at you, the dialogue is contrived and uninteresting, the bosses are wtf am I in Azeroth? The surface lvls are small and linear.

About the only saving grace of the Act is the Cathedral where the level design is interesting, gothic and spooky and even that is a setup because thats the best part of D3, and it only goes downhill after Act1....

InBlack wrote on Jan 16, 2013, 09:36:Major patch, actually read some of the huge patchnotes. So far read nothing that would add anything of interest to the game, and worst of all no changes to MF and how it affects item quality.

A flawed game is still flawed, no matter how much polish it gets. The simple fact that they chose to base the entire game on the item hunt instead of skill progression/level is what ultimately killed this game.

Until they change that (I seriously doubt that) Im not coming back.

Why were you there in the first place, the whole game has always been about loot...

The game sucks, has nothing to do with RMAH, or the loot system, everything past act 1 was garbage and crammed... I would play the game still in act 1 over and over.. and play different toons, but forcing me thru the weaker levels till the end over and over thru all dificulty modes where NO loot drops till inferno.. No thanks..Especially with how crappy the boss fights are... so lame boring and obviously made by artists not game dvelopers, which no longer exist.

I tried hard, really, I almost made it to lvl 10 in the demo before laughing it off as a bad joke.

ARPG's need to bring more to the table these days than "Loot hunt". That was fine with Diablo II came out because we didn't have a huge array of other options to sink our time in to. These days, I have a Steam Sale Backlog (yep, it's big enough to deserve capitalisation...), MMO's (F2P and a paid sub) not to mention books, the odd TV show or movie and RL vying for my attention... The old treadmill just isn't enough to cut it anymore.

Necrophob wrote on Jan 16, 2013, 14:58:My biggest problem with D3? A sashaying Diablo. It was like the dev team was really trying to troll all fans.

Diabloboobs. The weird androgynous voice on Diablo at the end sounded so lame, even Jennifer Hale couldn't save that shit. There was a ton of stuff in the game where I was just like "WTF were they thinking?".

I got this D3 on day one and had a blast playing it solo, then I played it with friends. I even didn't mind the hours of replaying an area with a friend coz it was a lot of fun

Then after some random patch, I wasn't really having fun...actually the game became quite a pain. So I logged on to the general chat room and asked wtf happened....apparently repair costs went through the roof and IAS was uber nerfed

stuck around for a few weeks, even visited their forums and did all the "like" bullshit to support a feature people wanted, but it just was never the same.

Agreed, item hunting is a big part of the ARPGs. I actually expressed myself incorrectly in my OP, what I meant to say is that that a game that focuses exclusively on the item hunt ALONE while disregarding the other very important part of Diablo, the character planning/building/growing i.e. skill progression or more basically level progression is inherently flawed...

And even the item hunt in D3 is very very flawed in many ways...

I also agree that the game is probably in a much better state than it was at launch, for one it has PvP. But still, I cant see myself going back to it unless they rip out and completely replace the horrible skill/rune system with something resembling what D2 had. I cant see that bunch of self-congratulating developers that consider themselves the best in the world (because they work at Blizzard) ever doing that.

InBlack wrote on Jan 16, 2013, 09:36:A flawed game is still flawed, no matter how much polish it gets. The simple fact that they chose to base the entire game on the item hunt instead of skill progression/level is what ultimately killed this game.

Until they change that (I seriously doubt that) Im not coming back.

I don't know, item collection/crafting/etc is a big part of the ARPG experience to me. I think they had several different execution problems here and a fundamental misunderstanding of what people liked about ARPGs. They went lavish on production values related to story (though it wasn't a good one at all) and spent less polish time on many of the gameplay elements that Blizzard used to beat into the ground before release.

I do agree though that the game is inherently flawed in a way that's not really fixable, they have patched it up to a better place than release though. I really want a faster pace of combat like Diablo 2 again and all of those new ARPGs have let me down in that regard - PoE, TL2, etc. It doesn't have to be all twitch but some twitch is nice because it gives you a challenge outside of build planning.

Optional nickname wrote on Jan 16, 2013, 09:57:Some people took only 20 hours , some 200, some 2,000, some 20,000, and some may take 200,000 hours to kick this habit. Which one are you?

If you are refering to me, Im the one that kicked it once I figured out I wasnt actually having fun while playing the game. I would spend more time on the forum whining about it (since day1) hoping the devs would listen than actually playing it. Im the one who tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, Im the one who loved D1 and D2 to such a degree that it took quite a while for me to realize how inferior this game is to both of its predecessors, and finally Im the one that tells you to go trolling somewhere with that lousy bait....

Major patch, actually read some of the huge patchnotes. So far read nothing that would add anything of interest to the game, and worst of all no changes to MF and how it affects item quality.

A flawed game is still flawed, no matter how much polish it gets. The simple fact that they chose to base the entire game on the item hunt instead of skill progression/level is what ultimately killed this game.